We’re ignoring hard lesson of our collapse

THE wise words — “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” — neatly encapsulates the valuable lesson that there is really no such thing as a free education. 

Experience and wisdom come at a cost, sometimes a bruising one. Our enthusiastic, lemming-like demands for the restoration of indulgences funded by borrowing that led to the loss of our economic sovereignty less than a decade ago suggests that we might update that shame-on-me nugget: “Fool yourself once foolish you, fool yourself twice tragic you.”

The extract published today from Daniel McConnell and John Lee’s Hell at the Gates is a reminder of how desperate, how isolated, and how close to collapse we were at the lowest point of that calamity. It is also a chastening reminder of how we were so complicit in our own downfall. The extract is far more than a history of desperate times, it is a warning that, by any objective criteria, we seem hellbent on repeating the mistakes that set this Republic back by at least a decade and made us dependent on the questionable and expensive — and likely to get more expensive — kindness of strangers.